Struggling with how to free up WordPress disk space to avoid bumping into your host’s limits?
For most WordPress sites, finding ways to optimize your images and other media offers the fastest and best ROI for freeing up WordPress disk space, but there are also some other areas you might want to consider.
In this post, you’ll first learn how to check your current WordPress disk space to understand how much data your site is taking up. Then, you’ll learn 👨🎓 how to free up WordPress disk space by optimizing images and other areas of your site.
How to check your current WordPress disk space allocation
There are a few ways you can check your current WordPress disk space allocation. Often, your hosting control panel will show it on your dashboard:
Of course, you can also ask your host directly. If you do this, you can also ask follow-up questions about what eats up your resources and what you can leave be.
However, the fastest way to check your WordPress disk space is through the Site Health tool within WordPress. You’ll find it at the Tools → Site Health link, and the Info → Directories and Sizes tab will give you a breakdown of resource allocation:
From here, you can compare this to your known hosting disk allocation, and put a plan of action in place to reduce your disk usage.
How to free up WordPress disk space through image optimization
In this section, we’ll look at four of the most effective ways to save some WordPress disk space by optimizing your images. They’re not in any order, so read up on them all and try out each one to see what’s most optimal for your needs!
- Delete unused images
- Use smaller image sizes for your site
- Optimize your images using online tools
- Use external hosting for large files
1. Delete unused images
Here’s a method that’s the equivalent of taking a sledgehammer to a watermelon: delete images you don’t use. You don’t want clutter, so if you remove those images in their entirety, you’ll save on some WordPress disk space (potentially a lot).
⚠️ Note – before deleting any images, we recommend taking a backup of your site and storing it in an off-site location.
To do this, head to the Media → Library screen within WordPress:
If you click onto an image, you can check the file size and delete the image using the link at the bottom of the screen:
However, if you want to delete multiple images at once, you can use the Bulk Select button on the main Media Library screen:
Once you click this, you can select images, then use the Delete Permanently button to get rid of them.
To help you quickly find images that you might want to delete, you can change the All media items drop-down to Unattached. This will let you filter out only images that aren’t attached to a post.
However, just because an image is unattached doesn’t automatically mean you should delete it. You still want to inspect each image before clicking the delete button.
2. Use smaller image sizes for your site
In general, small images mean a smaller file size – although you do need to make sure you serve scaled images for the highest quality. There are plenty of ways to do this, but your operating system (OS) may have everything you need.
For example, on macOS, the Preview app has a way to change dimensions through the Tools → Adjust Size menu option:
From here, you can save your changes and upload the images to WordPress at a reduced size. You might also find these sorts of tools online.
3. Optimize your images using online tools
Optimizing your images is a fantastic idea regardless of whether you want to save WordPress disk space or not. There are a lot of options available that will get the job done, and many are entirely free.
For example, one of our staff writers made a really good one that optimizes up to 20 images at once. The free Optimole image compressor is another great choice:
Optimole is also available as a WordPress image optimization plugin. It comes with many useful features, including the ability to resize your images on the fly, based on what’s best for any given site visitor.
For example, if a visitor has slow internet speed, Optimole will automatically reduce image quality to make the page load faster. It will also choose the best image format to serve, regardless of which format you upload.
As an optimization tool, it beats out much of the competition, but if you’re the type who likes to weigh your options, then check out our comparison of the top WordPress image optimizer plugins. There are plenty of suitable choices, and we encourage you to look at as many as you can. This way you can find the right one for your needs.
4. Use external (cloud) hosting for large files
Although optimization is important, you’ll get even more benefits by moving your media files to external storage. There are plenty of WordPress plugins and services available that will do this for you. Two really good options are Advanced Media Offloader and the aforementioned Optimole.
For the former, you need to sign up with a cloud provider and then link your cloud account with the plugin. The easiest option is probably Cloudflare, which lets you store up to 10 GB per month for free. After you enter your Cloudflare (or other provider) credentials inside the plugin and link your account, select Full Cloud Migration to offload your images:
If you prefer to minimize the amount of installed plugins on your site, then Optimole is the better route to take for this. It gives you all the image optimization benefits previously mentioned, but includes image offloading as well:
The only caveat is that image offloading is an Optimole premium feature. This means you’d need to upgrade to at least the entry-level plan to take advantage of it. Depending on your budget and desire for all-in-one convenience, the $19.08 per month could be well worth it.
Otherwise, you can stick with Optimole’s free tier for image optimization and then use the Advanced Media Offloader for image offloading.
Some quick ways to recover a small amount of WordPress disk space
If you already carry out the four ways we mention, you’ll want to look into “marginal gains.” There are a couple of ways you can claim small amounts of WordPress disk space that may help you keep your disk allocation looking sweet.
Remove old backups
These can take up space, and the likely reality is that you don’t need older backups than around a month. If you delete them, you can regain a few precious megabytes. Better yet, you should store your backups on off-site storage such as Amazon S3 or Google Drive. This not only frees up WordPress disk space, but it also makes your backups much more robust and secure.
Delete old themes and plugins
This is not only a way to optimize your disk space, it’s also good site security. You should get rid of any themes or plugins you don’t use and keep your WordPress installation clean.
Consider the size of your video files
When you consider image optimization, don’t forget video, too. These files can be huge, and more websites offer them as web technology increases.
However, despite this, there aren’t too many tools to help you reduce the size of your video. At least, not with the same frequency as image optimization. Instead, you’ll often have to make sure you render video with the right settings to keep the file size down.
In fact, one of the best ways to keep your WordPress disk space intact is to offload any media on your site to an external Content Delivery Network (CDN) or dedicated video service.
Many site owners will also figure that comments, drafts, and other on-site elements take up WordPress disk space. However, that isn’t always true. In our final section, we’ll look at why.
Why purging your database might not save WordPress disk space
There are many other elements of your site that need to live somewhere. For example, take your draft posts and pages, or comments section entries.
However, these won’t take up any WordPress disk space under typical circumstances. This is because each of these on-site elements live in the database.
Instead, many hosting providers won’t factor database sizes into your disk space allocation. As such, optimizing and pruning your database won’t make a difference to your available resources.
Conclusion 🧐
Media is important for almost every modern website, so you’ll likely have lots of images, video, and graphics on your site.
However, you can reduce the size of nearly all of these using image optimization. While our preferred way to cut down on file sizes is to offload images using a tool such as Optimole, you can also win back WordPress disk space using other online tools and deleting images altogether.
Do you have any questions about using image optimization to reclaim WordPress disk space? Ask us in the comments section below!
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